The Bobby-Soxer

by Hortense Calisher

  “Not for that.” No, he would have to send me the money. Against all his pattern I knew so well, I had dreams of that.

  “Aha. You’re weakening. What would you use it for?”

  I shrugged, shaking my head. Bill Wetmore would use it, he said, if he were I. He claimed artists were excused from both the consequences of money and its sources.

  Knobby came in again for his last load. He took his cap from the hall tree and sat it on his head at an angle. Until lately he had worn it straight, but as the time neared for his prospective wife to come, he was becoming more offhand American; even his food had changed. He was preparing to enlighten her.

  Picking up the load, he nodded at my mother—“Somebody’s still at it. I checked.” And went out again.

  Somebody’s still at what, I wondered. She would soon elucidate, as they said down home, and of course she did, toying at a last brown parcel with a gossipy foot. “Some nosy’s been picking over our dumped trash. Wraps and ties it up again. Does it on the dumpster’s day off. Leaves a donation for the dumpster. With a note nothing’s been taken.”

  She and I exchanged what I now think of as the peccadillo smile. That familiar one which recognizes the accepted flaws of society, or of some member of it. I know now such smiles occur at every level, from the White House say, to the close-ups in the subtler movies, but in those days I thought them indigenous only to where I grew up, and even in the act of performing one, I felt mired again in all the rhythms taught me—for it was the smile of all our little social-lying selves.

  The dumpster, for instance, so-called because to run the dump in all its phases was his official job, was also guardian and tender of the cemetery, each chore excusing his absence from another. We all knew that where he could be found soonest was at the pool hall, cueing for tips, but since his was that fringe life which makes other lives seem real, the town was proudest of him for his absences. We too always left a donation at the shack he kept his mock office in.

  On the way there I usually sat up front with Knobby. That day, my mother sat there. Broad though the old Lincoln was—it too had been the bankrupt’s, it could not accommodate both my grandmother’s hat and my mother’s with the separation each wearer required. I sat with my grandmother, in the back seat. Not so long ago that might have frightened me, but today I could sit pleasurably ensconced in a jelly of my own feelings, a broad band of which, paling from dark rose to nude as it left me, seemed to outline and protect me, as a violin case does a violin. Only with Bill Wetmore was I ever bare of this strip of—what was it, mapped receptivity?—belonging only to me. Even then—he would say—he had to wear me down; getting to me was like walking through a bead curtain, until at last we were together, in the foreplay of sex. He himself had never felt a feeling-band, although at adolescence he had been all quills. He drew a picture of us so—“you in your aura of snatch, me in my porcupine karate belt”—which he clearly wanted me to save, as women do, but I did not. What I felt wasn’t all snatch.

  In the end, gesture, not sex, would be what would release me. The studying of it, the learning of it, the watching for it, helped me break out of my pupa case, if that it was, by means of those body starts and facial moves which were now seeming to me to underlie all human drive—as in class we were taught how the phalanx underlay so much of Greek art. Meanwhile, such practice became a focus apart from him. This I didn’t tell him, and scarcely acknowledged to myself. It would be a long time before I had gestures of my own.

  I could tell my grandmother was nervous, fiddling in her lap with the collection of calling cards she always used as we went along, to locate and list where old houses and acquaintances had been, or still were, though she never stopped to visit. Before our family arrived the town had never heard of such usages as cards, nor had she. According to my father, she took certain customs from old novels and etiquette manuals found on the shelves of her new residence, not noticing their dates. “And bang, instant aristocracy,” he said, though the town had balked at fingerbowls. “It’s the women who have charge of daily life,” he wrote me once. “I had to hunt my way out of that.” I wondered who had charge of his dailiness now.

  I studied her hands, noting how the corrugated veins of an old person were rather greener than the accepted blue. How the earlobes also became prominent. How in fact her good Knox hat of tan felt, that staple for those of her years and social standing, made her look like some old soldier from an as yet unidentified garrison.

  I had forgotten that she too was staring.

  When we got there, the dumpster as usual was away. The dump itself always reminded me of some harsh engraving; it was mercilessly clear to the smallest details of its accretion, while its greater outline rose in those pure, swarthy dunes that in religious tracts depicted either heaven or hell. At the bottom, an ashy substance had formed out of the once natural clay mixed with all detritus, strewn with shell and shards of crockery whose blues or flower bits one might even recognize. Next rose the enormous inventory of appliances, baby carriages to cookstoves, mattresses yawing their cottons, enamel bedpans and three-legged chairs upended, all under a constant fluttering of newspapers, flopping rolls of vinyl, and the hushed whirr of whatever other substance took the wind. At intervals during the year a caterpillar tractor ground all this down. At the very top, the cone rose to be bald earth again, and finally, weed. Going down the other side, one would pass these layers in reverse. No one was supposed to climb here except the dumpster himself, in his hipboots. Far to the right, where the main pile sloped out, his cart reared tongue upward, like a plow. Overall there was the smell of burning, in itself a heavy river to cross.

  We parked the big black car to the left of the shack. There was a side road which led to an area marked for current disposal but we never drove up there; instead, Knobby would unload from the car trunk and trundle off for the first of many trips, stepping delicately. He never wore boots. A white kerchief tied around his face made him look like a victim rather than a bandit; I had given up puzzling why. The sun, always lurid through haze here, had a special stasis, because we never seemed to hit rain. Take it or leave it, a dump was always some sort of parable. There could be no other reason why I could be so bored in this cul-de-sac and yet hear behind it the blind plashing of a greater life.

  While we sat waiting for Knobby to return, my grandmother took out her scent bottle, offering it to my mother, who took out her own, then to me, which I refused, though I hadn’t bathed since yesterday. On weekends, when Bill Wetmore was in Cobble Row with the old nurse, I never saw him. It was a comfortable charm to keep his spermy odor between my thighs.

  The door of the shack now and then swung. One could see the table where we left the tips, flanked by the dumpster’s chair and woodstove, and on out through to the back, which was open and doorless. A car stood there, too decent to be the dumpster’s; now and then he made private deals with those who had more to leave here than could wait for the pickups he did for the town. Often there was even money on the table, a tithe that we kids never more than dared each other to take. The devil’s mark would have appeared on us if we had stolen it.

  I had gone to grade school with a girl bearing such a mark, center of one cheek, who was supposed to have done that. Actually, her strawberry mark must have been with her since birth, yet at one time or another she would have been dared, as we all were, and the story must have got confused, as often happens to children who are marked. When I had been dared I had just laughed; perhaps she couldn’t afford to.

  It was peaceful here, like maybe at the end of the world when the smoke would be clearing, or on one of those metallic, overcast Sundays when there was nothing else going. Far away, Watanabe appeared, making his way to us slowly, empty-handed at last.

  “So it’s gone,” my grandmother said. “The last clutter in my house.”

  In the town it was not unusual for a woman to straighten every drawer and cupboard in her house before she went for an operation, so that all might see her fine
habits if anything went wrong. But my grandmother never went to doctors.

  “You won’t die for years yet,” my mother said from the front seat without turning her head. “You have to wait for your debentures to come due.”

  “That’s what they’re there for. To get me to a hundred—what else? Pays to have something to wait for.” A chuckle came from under the Knox hat. Money made her cheerful. “Whereas you’re not so lucky. Your ship has come in.”

  “Not all of it,” my mother said.

  Watanabe was slow in returning. As he neared, we could see he was taking the little sips of oriental meditation he sometimes did, to make us remember his nationality. Yet this impulse, to cock his head to a birdcall, or pause to pull a grass blade, was no less real and lyrical.

  Externalize. All the beginning world of it was in my lap and at my eyes, pure and hard in its physical manifestation, only waiting to be sorted and skeined by me, and given back again. What I would be doing with my body and my voice would be a recognition of the world. The stage-to-be for me, even if it was not to be that Chinese box of a thousand linings, the theater, would surely arrive.

  “God, isn’t it wonderful!” I cried out to it. “To be waiting.”

  Dumps make an echo. No one else said anything. Watanabe came up to us, taking off the white handkerchief. Now he was Knobby again, offering my grandmother his arm. She hung her big cretonne knitting bag on it, and walking under his ardently hovering attention but not leaning on him, made for the shack.

  She was going to pay, which for her was like taking communion and absolution both. Before leaving her check—never paying cash even here—she would have made private assessment of what merit she meant to acquire by such an act, and of how much that merit was worth to her. Here at the shack, according to Knobby, she always left something adequate. If money was the kind of emotion she could best transact, then in this particular exchange she was being very scrupulous.

  I think now that an obligation which had been at the core of her life had finally brimmed into all the crevices of her being, as can happen in age, when one tries to tidy up these ragged tides which will roll on without us. Who can say whether she did this too belatedly? One judges an action by its effect—and there I was.

  I got out of the car to stretch my legs. When I could afford a car of my own I would buy some old Thunderbird or other model which would accommodate them. A wind had come up. At the shack door the dumpster’s two geranium plants strove like dancers to meet it, but had to stay where they were. I could stretch freely, and in rivalry with those two poor tethered skimps I did so, from waist to shoulder to neck to arms, yawning at the sky. When my head came down again with happy expelled breath, I dropped to a squat, stomping from foot to foot, and shook myself like a wet puppy.

  I still use this old muscle relaxer, taught us by the school’s dance expert. If it works, I hear only her seamy, Russian-doll voice. If it does not, I see into my mother’s face, straining against the windshield Knobby had polished almost to air, her big hat tremoring like a bell. The face is never shallow to me now.

  Following its stare then, I saw what must be the crown of a man’s head bob up once, twice, along the bald rim of the big dune, and sink down again—the unknown trash-picker maybe, unaware he had company. Then the whole man stood up, complete.

  It was Craig Towle, dark-vested against the sky, chin up like the world’s figurehead. That’s the way he looks when alone. You may begin to ask how I know.

  In the same moment that he bent his head and saw our car, my mother stepped out of it, closing its door slowly by leaning backward against it. She stayed that way for a minute, pressed there like a second figurehead. Then she walked forward, in that rocking way women take on when they confront, and stood there, one hand on the car’s hood. My grandmother emerged from the shack.

  With any luck, my grandmother might have been spared the sight of him. The dumpster’s tin doorsill was stuck high in the sand, and Watanabe, who will never reveal what or how much he sees or saw, was suddenly disentangling her skirt from one of the geraniums, and shielding her close. My mother and I would have been her natural points of reference. Who bothers to scrutinize a dump, especially when done with it?

  But just then, Craig Towle moved. Or some small, crinkling avalanche occurred in the dune itself; its sides were blanched with them. My grandmother raised her head.

  I try to see us as he must have seen us, three women angled up at him in an acute triangle, my mother at the apex. One old woman known, one woman better known, one unknown. Did he move on purpose? If so, to which?

  I know his hands were locked behind him—and do not unlock without reason. I know my grandmother tried to scream, because I learned right then that great age or sadness may not have the breath to—and have since heard a renowned stage presence give that same rasping whisper, which the last row of the audience could however hear. I know that the package he must have been holding behind him fell and skittered from him, to slip down and disappear between a pile of old roofing and a mangle, and that the package resembled the flat, laundry-size bundles seen an hour ago.

  My grandmother cried out—“Are live ones not enough for you? Must you have my dead girl too?” But even while it was happening I was unsure of the sequence of it. For, all that time my mother was standing burning-still.

  Knobby, holding my grandmother like a relative, whispered in her ear. He would be asking if he should retrieve the package. She shook her head. “Leave it to the law. Leave him. Look at him up there. On an ash heap. Where he belongs.”

  Craig Towle opened his mouth. But she turned her back on him and got into the car, summoning Knobby after her.

  Then my mother moved, without a word. But all the gestures came to her. First a signal to Craig Towle to return to the car behind the shack, which I saw now was the same Volks in which the bobby-soxer and I had gone to that bar. Then the signal that we were not to wait for her. She knew the right gestures, or they came to her. From where all the gestures come from.

  As we backed up in order to wheel around, Watanabe, who handled that car as one stroked a cat, let the motor die. From my seat in the rear I saw him stare straight ahead, his narrow eyelids almost closed, his cheek wet.

  Outside, my mother was walking up the dune, her high heels sinking in the ash and glut, so that she seemed to make no progress but continued toiling on between two streams of rubble, one on either side. Above, Craig Towle was looking down like a diver, at the stratum of found objects and destroyed ones which separated them. I saw him make the dip a man makes entering the jungle, to push the matted stuff aside. I saw him draw back, and try again. In my mind, she and he never meet.

  In the car, now moving, I took my grandmother’s wrists in my hands. If she shivered, she let them be. This was an enormous advance for both of us, for as far as I knew we had never touched. I couldn’t have done this a year ago. Being with Bill Wetmore again hadn’t made me any tenderer than I would ever be—a level which is not mine to judge. But it had taught me the non-exclusiveness of flesh. Or of human flesh. We are too unique in the world not to touch when we can.

  My grandmother’s pulse was steady. Below my ear I heard her respiration, faster than the rest of us, from that incredible engine her heart, carried so long. Her card case lay on the floor. As I picked it up, she disengaged her wrists. “I don’t get strokes.” But I was beginning to understand her.

  When we came out of the road from the dump and onto the highway and paused there, she rapped the back of the driver’s seat. Knobby had on his cap again and sat like a chauffeur.

  “We’ve had our visits. Drive home.”

  It took time to get across that highway, which had replaced so much farmland. The cars kept streaming by.

  “Grandmother—” I cried “—why don’t we go to the farm!”

  She turned her whole upper body. That is unusual for those so old. They tend to be immovable, except in the appendages. The whites of her eyes had dulled, but the brown pup
ils in their almost purplish rim had not. “Because we came from it.”

  Her voice sounded surprised that I had had to be told.

  We crossed the highway.

  “I’ll phone your father this evening. That man must be stopped.”

  We passed through Cobble Row, those chunky, deep-rooted houses. They had not been stopped. He would not be.

  We passed along our own street of fantailed windows and gables gawked high enough to satisfy the tallest. I wasn’t that sure of us.

  Her garage had once been the carriage shed, openable back and front by wide crescent doors. Knobby parked inside and went out the back. She always required a cup of tea “to rest me from the drive,” which was served her in the car, and we were not asked to share. We bore her no resentment. A taste for luxury of that order must be admired, my mother had said.

  We always left my grandmother to it, often not seeing her again until our next drive.

  This time, I stayed. Quiet wood was stacked against the walls here, in pew shapes I had never seen disturbed. Yard-long lengths of narrow moldings were bunched together and upended in their corner, maybe since the beginning of the house. Opposite these, in its own metal-walled corner, the sturdy kiln my brother and I had once vainly asked to reactivate was surrounded by rows of the red clay pots that were its product, and were still hosed down whenever Knobby washed the car. Yes, it was restful here. It had never been bogeyland. Curious how in that high-varnished house, ugly but energetically functioning, no place ever came to be that, even then.

  She wasn’t staring at me now. I wanted her to. “Grandmother—who lived upstairs before you did?”

  In the moment I asked, of course I knew, as you already may. But watch us work it out in our own way.

  “It can’t be cleared away,” I cried. “It can never. Why should it be?”

  I was wrong. Or half wrong. A life can be cleared away in a whip’s crack. But those opaque old eyes finally saw me. What’s more, the green-knotted hands laid hold of me, took charge of me, in what was going to be a connection. I might not want it, but it would be one.